The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Against all odds, Ra gave a mirthless, unpleasant smile. ‘No, my king.’

  ‘Look at the sky above us now, overcast with the coming storm. Most humans would name the shade of the clouds grey, in various languages. How are we to know if the grey one man sees is the same hue seen by the woman at his side? Or the grey his mother and father saw? A blind woman would see nothing, but she still feels the storm’s approach on the wind. She knows the sky is grey because she has been told it is so, yet she has never seen it. What, then, is grey? Is it the shade I see, or the hue seen by another man’s eyes? Is it only a colour, or is it also the feeling of the wind against your skin, promising a storm?’

  Ra exhaled. ‘I understand.’

  The Emperor seemed suddenly weary. He shook His head, a rare moment of human expression. ‘Beings of varying sentience and influence exist, given different names by different cultures and species. Gods. Aliens. Entities. It matters not.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to know these things, sire.’

  ‘Your wishes are irrelevant, Ra. You will fight harder once you understand what you are fighting for. That is why I tell you all of this.’

  ‘A matter of practicality?’ he asked the Emperor, taking no offence. ‘Not trust?’

  ‘A matter of victory. You still see the war in the webway as the battle for my dreams and ambitions as a ruler. But I have told you – it is the war for humanity’s survival.’

  The sudden crack of an aggravated power field snapped Ra’s focus back to the snowy tundra. Blood sizzled on the Emperor’s blade. The priest-king’s headless body toppled, neck stump steaming, into the dirty snow.

  Sagittarus gripped the severed head by its long hair, holding it up to the miserable sky. He roared, and thousands of Thunder Warriors roared with him.

  The Emperor cleaned His deactivated blade on the dead man’s cloak, then sheathed the sword across His back.

  ‘Always so barbaric, Sagittarus.’

  The Custodian tossed the head onto the ground. ‘Exultant in victory, my king. That’s all.’

  The Emperor rested an armoured boot on the priest-king’s head. Knee servos thrummed. He hesitated, for the span of a single breath, as all eyes fell upon Him.

  Then the boot came down, grinding the trophy into the dirt beneath the snow. When He lifted His tread, nothing but wet, red shards remained, stringy with slick hair.

  ‘Burn the body,’ said the Emperor. ‘Burn all of their bodies.’

  Thunder Warriors came forwards, armed with flamers.

  Awaken, Ra.+

  Sagittarus dreamed of unity, of his days at the Emperor’s side. The title itself – Imperator they had named him in High Gothic – was still new in those days. The Emperor was a warlord, a battle king, but not yet a king of kings. Terra had yet to be brought to its knees by bolter and blade.

  The dreamer was a warlord in his own right, then. He’d breathed in the body-stink and faecal-scent of a hundred battlefields in the hours after victory. He’d felt the caress of charnel winds against his flesh, and carried a golden spear in his bloodstained hands across an entire continent.

  Days of strength. Days of glory.

  He was the first of his kind to die. And for this indignity, this unquenchable shame, they had actually honoured him.

  The Battle of Maulland Sen. That was the last day of joy, the last day before his bones were bound inside a cradle of penetrating cold and his mind set aflame with the shame of failure.

  ‘Sagittarus.’

  That had been his name. His prime name. His golden armour had been wrought with etchings of his many names, all earned in triumph and honour, all granted by the Emperor Himself.

  The Emperor as He was, not as He became. The would-be Ruler of Terra, still so far from His ascension as the Master of Mankind.

  The Imperator was there at Maulland Sen, in the hours before the Thunder Legion met the priest-king’s ravening hordes. Armoured in archeotech and anachronism, his armour as much baked leather and bronze as ceramite, He stood upon a high rock as the rising sun turned the eagles on his armour to virgin gold.

  His army stood to the south, occupying the low ground. Their march to the enemy would be uphill, moving to ascend the rocky inclines in whatever formation they could hold. To the north were the enemy, a horde of branded zealots and dirty wildlanders on the plateaus of their last mountain fastness, clad in motorised plate armour and cloaked in poorly cloned furs to brace against the cold. Lumbering brutes fleshed out their numbers, more evidence of gene-forging gone awry with witchery instead of vision.

  They would bleed. At last, with the fall of Maulland Sen, Nordyc would be brought to heel. That blasted, frozen land. In Sagittarus’ memories it was freezing to the bone – and surely it had been that way – but the cold was no surprise to him when he recalled it now. All of his memories were cold.

  The Emperor had looked down upon the armoured ranks closest to Him, crudely armoured warriors in patched and remade suits of damaged ceramite. The campaign had been a long one, far more gruelling than predicted. His forces at the final battle were outnumbered by seven to one, though such numbers would mean nothing come the dawn. The enemy’s high walls meant equally little, and the treacherous ascent to lay siege meant the least of all. The Emperor’s army would sustain casualties, as every army always did. But sacrifice was bred into their bones. Victory would be theirs by the day’s end.

  The lives beneath His banner were there to be spent in the purchase of peace.

  Sagittarus had chafed against promised inaction that day. No warrior was ever truly still before a battle. They shifted, they shuffled. The rattle of so many suits of ceramite plating was a dull, constant clanking to rival an ocean’s tide. The angry thrum of fibre bundle muscle cabling and active back-mounted power packs was the drone of a locust swarm, a monotone buzz that drowned out spoken words. The only reliable way to speak was over the radioracle network, which was still flawed by occasional static interference.

  The warriors closest to the Emperor – a mere thirty souls with Sagittarus among them – wore layered, precious auramite gold, reflecting the warlord’s own wargear. In the years to follow, their trappings would become cloaked in red and bulked by additional plating, but as they stood at Maulland Sen they wore half-suits of sacred gold, and the men themselves were a jewel at the army’s vanguard, guarding their master. Their war banner was the eagle’s head of their royal lord crossed by four bolts of lightning.

  Beyond the Custodians were the ranks of the proto-legionaries in their grim, battered plate. Thunder Warriors. Even then Sagittarus had known what fate these soldiers of Unity would face. Their place was here and their time was now: they would be the conquerors of Terra… and then they would be discarded. Their armour was destined to stand in rows within the Emperor’s private chambers and various war museums across Terra, and their deeds would be recorded in rich detail throughout Imperial archives.

  But far finer soldiers would be required to take the Emperor’s war into the stars. Sagittarus, fallen yet not allowed to die, would be one of the many to spill Thunder Warrior blood.

  But not yet. Not today. Not on the morning of Maulland Sen.

  Here they would lose seven thousand, five hundred and eighty-one warriors against the defiant tides of Maulland Sen’s last defenders.

  He recalled how the Emperor ran a gloved hand through His wind-claimed hair, pulling it back from His dusky features. The wind had battered the crests atop the Thunder Warriors’ helms.

  ‘Sagittarus,’ the Emperor had said in a voice that carried above the drone of armour. Sagittarus, his helm adorned with a rearing eagle, turned to regard his liege.

  ‘My king?’

  ‘It is time. Your spear, please.’

  Sagittarus offered it without hesitation, raising his spear for the warlord’s reaching hand. The Emperor took the weapon, holding it fast in
one gloved fist halfway along the haft, and lifted it high. He held it horizontally, ordering His men to hold position, as officers in the Bronze Epoch and Iron Era of Old Earth had done in the centuries before radioracle systems and the vox-networks that would follow.

  Sagittarus felt the army shift, their focus tightening as they turned their attention to the Emperor, watching, waiting.

  There was no speech, for the army had its orders set in stone the night before. There were no curses or oaths, for those had already been given and made before the horde assembled. The Emperor said nothing at all. He signalled the advance, punching the horizontal spear three times towards the lightening sky.

  And there He remained as the regiments of the Thunder Legion shook the earth beneath their marching boots, advancing up into the foothills. His honour guard of thirty Custodians waited with Him, as did a host of banner bearers, aides, runners, attendants and advisors, each with their own stewards and guardians.

  Sagittarus watched the disorganised tide of soldiers making their way up the inclines. Their chaotic advance was as far from the implacable order of the Legiones Astartes as could be imagined. Nor could they rely on the same arsenal of biological enhancements implanted within the true Space Marines. These hordes were a force to crush the techno-savages of the Unification Wars, no doubt, but against the alien breeds of the galaxy? The Thunder Warriors would have been annihilated.

  The Emperor was paying scant heed to the battle’s opening, His patient gaze resting on the higher peaks. From there, the killing machines would soon rise. He handed the spear back to Sagittarus, who took it with due reverence.

  The Emperor checked the ornate bolter at His hip. One of the very first boltguns; a progenitor for its kind – not a relic rediscovered from the Dark Age of Technology but an invention of the Emperor’s own design.

  ‘Sagittarus.’ This time the Emperor’s mouth didn’t move. And His voice was low, too low, to be the warlord’s true tone. ‘Sagittarus.’

  What remained of Sagittarus leaned his forehead against the cold surface of his vision lenses, staring out through the greasy red smears of reinforced transplastic.

  ‘Sagittarus,’ said one of his own kind, looking up at the armoured cradle that held his revenant bones.

  Ra, he mouthed, his toothless, scarred mouth full of a thick, oxygen-rich synthetic oil.

  ‘Ra,’ intoned the speakers mounted in the armoured chassis of his walking tomb.

  ‘My apologies for interrupting your reflections,’ said the tribune.

  The Dreadnought didn’t move as a living being moved. It had none of the incidental and unnecessary gestures of natural motion. Its movements were statuesque and reserved, coming between bouts of unnatural stillness. It was easy to forget there was a living warrior interred within, though the exact parameters for a Contemptor chassis to sustain life at the point of death was a philosophical argument the warriors of the Ten Thousand had engaged in more than once before. The life support systems suggested the warrior lived, yet the hull itself cradled a remnant in a sarcophagus that would truly die the moment the biological husk was disconnected.

  Internment within a Dreadnought chassis straddled the border between both life and death – an intolerable weakness that required sacred machinery to maintain, coupled with a strength of purpose so unquenchably fierce that it defied the grave.

  The Ten Thousand, supremely educated and philosophical souls all, had ultimately reached the only conclusion that mattered: their hesitancies and doubts meant nothing. It was the Emperor’s will that His warriors live and fight until they could no longer do either. That very testament was inscribed upon Sagittarus’ armoured hull by the Emperor’s own carving hand: Only in death does duty end.

  ‘Memories,’ the great golden machine replied. ‘They cling to me, Ra. Sometimes it seems as though the mist brings them.’

  Ra had entertained the same thought more than once. The two Custodians stood in the Godspire’s courtyard, where whole stretches of the long-dead alien botanical garden were given over to prefab Mechanicum architecture. A shanty town of Martian industrial ingenuity, dark against the pale eldar bone and grey Mechanicum gunmetal of the resurrected city.

  Sagittarus was undergoing maintenance within an open-sided engineering-barracks. Sparks sprayed. The air reeked of sacred oils and fusing metal. A coterie of arming servitors and archwrights worked the Dreadnought’s shell, repairing the hull and reloading the arm-mounted weaponry. Each of Sagittarus’ movements disturbed the technical ballet taking place around him, generating a chorus of complaints that he duly ignored.

  Ra stood before the tall Dreadnought shell – which bore enough cracks and pits and dents across its golden surface that it resembled the surface of some asteroid-tortured planetoid – and tried not to see Sagittarus’ ruination as a statement for the entire Ten Thousand. Those who remained had all seen better days.

  ‘Sometimes I see ghosts in the mist,’ said the Dreadnought.

  ‘There is no such thing, my noble friend. Ghosts are a fiction.’

  ‘Most of them are eldar. I think they’re begging. They reach out towards me. Not all of them are alien. I see familiar faces turned to smoke, the images of the Ten Thousand that have already fallen.’

  Ra watched as the war machine’s weapons cycled, evidently eager to fire. Death hadn’t soothed Sagittarus’ easy and willing wrath. The Dreadnought turned its hull in a grind of servos, and several of the attending machine-adepts emitted binaric curses. ‘Do you ever see ghosts in the mist, Ra?’

  ‘No,’ Ra lied.

  There came the sound of a machine slipping its gears, the Dreadnought shell’s attempt to vocalise the laughter of the revenant within. ‘Very well. What do you need of me? There is much to do before the foe reaches us.’

  ‘Nothing more than you already give. I bring a warning for the battle to come.’

  The Dreadnought opened and closed its immense fist as if testing its knuckle joints, then rotated its hand at the wrist with a grinding whirr. Ra saw the pale face of the corpse within move behind the murk of the machine’s eye-lenses.

  ‘What warning?’

  ‘The Emperor and the Soulless Queen have warned of a warp-entity possessing surpassing strength among the enemy hosts. It destroyed the Protector released by Commander Krole, along with its warhost.’

  The Dreadnought shifted with a clanking thud. Protectors, the Sicarian Alphas at least, rarely died easily, but it was the notion of the Emperor’s warning that sat ill in Sagittarus’ heart.

  ‘Do we know its capabilities?’

  ‘Little beyond its lethality.’

  The golden war machine cycled its autoloaders slowly and smoothly, allowing the tech-priests to study the motion for flaws.

  ‘We should destroy it, Ra. Destroy it before it reaches the walls and we lose it inside the city. Once the fighting is street to street, disorder will reign.’

  ‘As it happens I agree, but we can hardly sally forth in a grand charge when we’re still evacuating the outward tunnels. The rearguard forces are aware of the threat and the Unifiers are seeking to map the creature’s likely routes of attack. If we have that, we can lay an ambush.’

  ‘An ambush, then. Before it’s loose in Calastar.’

  ‘Truthfully, Sagittarus, I’m more worried about it slipping past us and reaching the throne room.’

  The Dreadnought mused, its knuckles closing and opening, opening and closing, betraying a habit its pilot had performed in life. Within its hollow palm, the magnetic coils of an embedded plasma gun ticked in metronomic idleness. Within the shell, the revenant of Sagittarus was studying the data-streams, seeking reports.

  ‘Did the Protector send a mortis-pulse?’ asked Sagittarus.

  Ra keyed in a command on his ornate vambrace, the buttons elegantly forming part of the soaring eagle sculpted upon the auramite. He threaded Alpha-Rho-25’s
final audiovisual transmission across a private vox-link directly to the Dreadnought.

  The playback repeated. After several seconds Sagittarus rose to his feet in a harmony of whining snarls. ‘What does that mean? That word?’

  ‘You hear a word within that mess?’ Ra’s surprise was brazen. ‘The Emperor sensed it, as well. I hear nothing but Alpha-Rho-Twenty-Five’s death.’

  ‘It repeats, like the static of disconnection is breathing. Drach’nyen. Drach’nyen. Drach’nyen.’

  Ra heard it then. The Emperor’s voice came back to him, when his master had spoken of the name’s meaning.

  ‘Drach’nyen,’ he repeated. ‘The End of Empires.’

  Part Two

  The Necessity

  of Tyranny

  Seven

  Land’s Raider and Land’s Crawler

  The Twelfth

  Disciple of the Unmaker God

  Arkhan Land considered himself a man of peace. He was first and foremost a technoarchaeologist, devoting his life to the rediscovery of schematics and Standard Template Construct data lost since the Dark Age of Technology. He was rather renowned in that field, and accordingly proud of the fact.

  Who had ventured for years through the deep crust and mantle vaults of the Librarius Omnis with its horde of lethal traps and hardcoded defensive systems? Why, that would be Arkhan Land. Who had mapped a region of the catacombs beneath the surface of Sacred Mars equal to that of a small nation? Well, that would also be Arkhan Land. Who had uncovered the ancient schematics necessary to reintroduce production of the Raider-pattern main battle tank into the sphere of human knowledge? Once more, it was none other than Arkhan Land.